


In the Arena

by imma_redshirt



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, More characters to be added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:07:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28762299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imma_redshirt/pseuds/imma_redshirt
Summary: A Mandalore and a Jedi--two age old enemies facing off in an enclosed arena for a cheering audience and an exhilarated crime lord.Except they know each other. They're friends, actually--sort of. If they only knew each other's names.So much for the fight of the ages.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Comments: 4
Kudos: 60





	In the Arena

**Author's Note:**

> I'm thinking Cal and Co. might show up later. Gonna be honest, I don't have this planned very well--but I've decided 2021 is the year of writing all the dumb unplanned things, so here's another one!

Someone was dragging Din across a bumpy landscape.

He had only just become conscious enough to register the strain of his arms pulled taut over his head and the drag of the rocky ground beneath his listless legs when whoever was dragging him paused. 

Din’s head felt heavy. He let it lull forward as he listened, eyes shut, and tried to remain still.

“Would it be more profitable to take the helmet now,” a mechanized voice said. A droid, then, or some living being using a vocoder. Whatever it was, it’s grip on him had not faltered--it still held the upper half of his body off the ground. He felt the sting of binders pulled tight around his bare wrists. His gauntlets were gone, and with them the whistling birds. After carefully shifting his ankles, felt binders tight about his boots as well. And the familiar weight of jetpack was gone. 

Great.

Another voice answered after a moment. This was not a droid, and they answered slowly as if they had considered the option. “No… no, helmet’s the most recognizable thing about these guys--Tormo’ll want the audience to know he has a live Mandalorian in his arena. Besides, we’ve already got these kriffin’ gloves and this jet pack... thing. Someone’ll buy these things for _something._ ”

Tormo. Din scowled. Sarc Tormo had dozens of bounty hunters in his Outer Rim syndicate. They weren’t part of the Guild and had no sense of honor or followed any discernible codes or rules. They only had their loyalty to their leader, and even that apparently was flimsy at best.

They were also notorious for delivering their bounty to Tormo’s fighting arena. Din had never seen the arena himself, but he knew of it, and it was not a place he wanted to be shipped off to like some disposable holochess chip.

He had business to do. He had…

Well, actually, he couldn’t quite remember. 

He opened his eyes and saw the world through his helmet’s visor. Thankfully they hadn’t removed it. His head was still dipped forward, chin resting on his chest plate, so much of his view was of his own armor. He could see some of the ground beside his legs. It was barren, with sharp rocks strewn about, and the pale dirt sparked something in his memory.

Yukal IV. He had landed on the dry little planet to find some Mandalorian artifact that had been hidden there ages ago. Bo Katan had been secretive about what exactly it had been, but she had been adamant that it was hidden deep in a cavern that sat like a gaping wound somewhere on the planet’s pale, barren surface.

Only the Mand’alor could retrieve it, she had insisted with that familiar, deliberate serenity that simmered at the edges with anger and resentment.

And he couldn’t take the Darksaber. Tradition forbade it.

They were traditions he did not know. Rules he had never been taught to follow. But he was already deep in efforts to retake Mandalore, and he and Bo Katan had grudgingly made a flimsy pact with each other--they would give and take where they could.

So he left it. 

Bo Katan wouldn’t go near it. Din honestly didn’t mind--he had hoped against hope that maybe she would think to kriff with rules and just take it for herself. But he knew she wouldn’t. She held to her beliefs the way he held to his. 

After landing on the planet, Din had been on the right track to find the artifact--well, he’d thought he had been, anyway. He’d been descending into a canyon that cut a jagged line across the planet, where his ship’s scanners had detected a system of caverns and narrow passages winding about beneath the surface. He had been moving carefully forward into the dark, the light of his helmet cutting through the shadows ahead. He’d been careful--scans had shown some dangerous life forms nearby, but none in the canyon. It had been void of life. Still, he’d been in enough near-death situations to know that letting his guard down wasn’t advisable in the least. 

He had heard something shifting in the dark ahead of him, and when he turned his light forward, something heavy had fallen on him from above. He remembered a flash of pain, the ground rushing forward to meet him, and then darkness.

They had dropped a kriffing boulder on him. His armor had been the only thing that kept him alive, or at least free of a shattered skull. It had knocked him out to be captured by the most deplorable bounty hunters in the galaxy, apparently.

If Bo Katan could see him now--

There was a grunt above him, and whoever had a hold on him began to drag him across the unforgiving ground again. 

“It would be possible to remove a small, single piece,” the mechanized voice said. “A pauldron, perhaps.”

“Maybe,” the other voice said before laughing. “Not like those’ll help him in the arena. Just needs enough armor to give everyone a good show, anyway.”

They paused again. Din clenched his fists. They had likely taken his blaster and the blade hidden in his boot. If he’d still had his gauntlets, he could have used the whistling birds and been done with them in seconds flat. But they were gone.

Suddenly, he was pulled forward and thrown against something that _clanged_ when his armor hit the surface. He blinked, looked up, and took in his surroundings quickly--a gunship loomed overhead, and two bounty hunters stood over him. One, a bounty droid larger than the other hunter with half a dozen red optics aimed in different directions, held a control in one grey hand. The other hunter tilted his helmeted head to watch Din before shrugging and kneeling.

“I’m sure Tormo won’t notice they’re gone,” he said. “And a little extra credits on the side wouldn’t hurt, either.”

He reached for Din’s left shoulder. 

Din waited a breath, and when the hunter was close enough, threw his arms around the exposed neck and pulled until the binders held tight.

The hunter choked and struggled. Din rolled them towards the edge of the ramp just in time--a blaster bolt hit the metal where Din had been laying.

“ _Don’t fire!_ ” The choking hunter gasped. He gripped at Din’s forearms and pulled. “You’ll hit me, you idiot droid--”

“Cease,” the mechanized voice demanded. Din pulled the bingers tighter, pressed one knee into the hunter’s flimsily armored thigh to pin him more securely, and glanced up at the blaster pointed towards his face.

“Release the binders,” he said. He jerked the binders in question and the hunter gagged. “Release them and I’ll let your friend go.”

“We are not companions,” the droid said, just as the hunter wheezed, “ _He’s not my doshin’ friend, you--”_

“So I can kill him then,” Din said. He pulled his wrists tighter together over the man’s neck. 

“ _No, no--”_ the hunter said in a voice continued to shrink under breathless wheezing. 

The droid was quiet for a moment. Then it raised the hand holding the binder controls. 

“I have considered three-hundred and four point two scenarios,” it said. “My own well-being and profits fare better if I follow this particular path.” 

It pressed a button on the side. 

Pain struck Din like a pillar of beskar to the face. Electricity crackled in his ears and he saw flashes of neon blue in his vision before his eyes shut and his body curled in on itself on reflex. Distantly he could hear the other hunter screaming in pain but nothing mattered beyond the agony flinging about his body. 

Then a shrill ringing replaced the crackle of electricity. The electricity had stopped, but the pain hadn’t. He trembled where he lay, curled like sprig of herbs his mother used to press into the bread she baked, and clenched his teeth against the pain that still throbbed along his limbs. 

At some point the hunter had slipped from his hold and lay somewhere nearby, still wheezing. 

“You--you damned kriffin’ metalhead,” the man gasped. “He had the binders near my neck! I--I could have _died_!” 

“And yet you survived,” the droid said. Heavy footfalls sounded, and a metal hand gripped Din by both wrists and lifted him up. He gritted his teeth to stifle a groan and forced his eyes open. 

His face was level with the droid’s chest. He glanced up, eyeballs burning as if grains of sand had gotten stuck beneath his eyelids, and found all six of the droid’s cold red optics watching him. 

“Multiple doses of sedatives will be administered to safely deliver the bounty,” the droid said. It’s free hand tilted down, and a needle popped out of it’s wrist. Din grunted and tried to struggle, but his limbs refused to cooperate. “Do not worry. If my calculations are correct, the dosage will not kill you.” 

“Sometimes they’re not,” the hunter wheezed, and his breathless laughter punctuated the sting of the needle jabbing into the side of Din’s neck. 

Din felt the sedatives quickly take hold. His eyelids grew heavy, and even the pain wasn’t enough to keep them from blinking shut. His head dipped forward, too heavy to hold up, and the world began to spin. 

The dark closed in. Din felt himself being carried up the ramp before he was dropped onto something hard, and the bounty hunters’ voice flowed around him like muffled whispers. He lay where he fell, weighed down by too many sedatives and lingering pain. This, he thought, was another reason in the long list of reasons of why it was better than the kid wasn’t with him any longer. Their clan of two was better off a clan apart, where at least his kid was safe on some far off planet with a Jedi guardian. 

The thought brought some comfort as it followed him into a sedated abyss. 


End file.
